The Hole Story

3 months behind the counter at Voodoo Doughnut.

“TALKING SHIT ABOUT HALL & OATES WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE DISCIPLINARY ACTION.”

This
sign hanging next to the employee schedule at Voodoo Doughnut is
probably a joke, but I’m not quite sure. Working at this bright-pink
tourist trap in Old Town seemed like it would be fun, but now I’m
wondering. It’s late June and the shop is 95 degrees because management
believes air conditioning disturbs the magic of the dough. Voodoo does
not offer training classes or videos for newly hired doughnuteers—just
an old-fashioned pep talk in a back hallway crowded with bikes and empty
milk crates.

“This
job is hard,” says my new boss, Wayne, as he delivers mine. “It’s going
to sound like I’m yelling at you right now, but every new person hears
this. This job is fun, but it’s also dangerous. You’ll meet a lot of new
friends here—people start bands, meet their boyfriends or girlfriends
here, have parties, whatever. It’s a good old time. Do whatever you want
on your own time, but you are here to work. Do not show up to work
drunk or stoned—ever. You can slip and fall and burn your face in the
fryer.”

I hung up my backpack in a cramped hallway, noticing yet another pink sign.

“DO NOT PUT YOUR DRINKS ON THE BENCH—THIS IS WHERE MY BUTT GOES.”

After
working at Voodoo Doughnut for three months, I learned that Wayne was
right: It’s hard. It’s not hard because the employees are stoned
deadbeats, but because there’s pressure on the crew working the register
to take in $5,000 in an eight-hour shift selling a product that costs
an average of $2, much of it purchased by confused tourists who just
survived a gauntlet of aggressive panhandlers. That girl with the septum
piercing may look like she’s too cool to care while working the
register. But if she doesn’t take in $1,000 during the first four hours
of her Friday-afternoon shift, there’s a decent chance she won’t be here
Saturday.

To
folks on the other side of the register, Voodoo Doughnut looks like
bedlam. The music is loud, the employees are terminally hip, and the
lobby is decorated with satanic bric-a-brac and stained-glass portraits
of owners Tres Shannon and Kenneth “Cat Daddy” Pogson.

But
everything at Voodoo is deliberate, right down to the strategies for
getting customers out the door fast, the secret ways cashiers push
certain doughnuts on the unsuspecting, and that counting room in the
back with piles of cash.

Voodoo
already has two busy locations in Portland and another in Eugene. This
week, Voodoo hosts a grand-opening party for its first out-of-state
store, in Denver. Austin, Texas, is rumored to be next. Pogson told the Portland Business Journal last June that Voodoo plans to expand into 10 to 20 stores across the country.

Don’t
be distracted by the crushed-velvet portrait of rapper Rick Ross Isaac Hayes or the
ear-splitting death metal—Voodoo is perhaps the most ruthlessly
efficient business in Portland. Somewhere, there’s probably a pink
spreadsheet showing a 10-percent increase in productivity as “Maneater”
plays in the kitchen.

ILLUSTRATION: Jenny Zych

“I don’t really like doughnuts,” a tan guy with spiky hair and a neon-green Nike shirt says to me.

“You’d like five doughnuts?” I shout back at him. Metallica is cranked to 11. I really can’t hear shit.

The
secret to Voodoo’s success is that even tourists who hate doughnuts have
to go there—they heard about it from Anthony Bourdain, Jay Leno or Time
magazine. Maybe they saw a couple get married there on TV, or heard
about how the Food and Drug Administration ordered the shop to stop
topping doughnuts with NyQuil and Pepto-Bismol. However it happened, a
bacon maple bar is now an essential gold coin for anyone who wants to
claim they saw Portland. Not getting one would be like leaving Las Vegas
without throwing a nickel in the slots.

“I
said I don’t really like doughnuts!” the man says. “I’m in town for the
Hood to Coast Relay and all my friends at Nike told me I had to come
here! I only want one—which should I get?”

This
is it, I thought. Today is the day I get canned because I have to spend
10 minutes helping this guy decide on the color of sprinkles on his
cake doughnut. There’s no way I’ll drop enough cash from my till at
lunchtime not to get fired—it just happened to the friendly goth kid
hired at the same time as me. The goth kid was nice, but he was slow.
The day manager intercepted him in the back room before his scheduled
shift. There were no goodbyes.

“My
girlfriend just texted me to get her something gluten-free, but I’m out
of cash. Do you take American Express?” Nike guy asks—oblivious to the
“CASH ONLY” signs. I watch the new guy at the next register ring up $30
in bacon maple bars for a portly couple in matching Oakland Raiders
jerseys. If I don’t keep things moving, the kid they’re training by my
side could be my replacement. He’s a tall, skinny kid wearing a
beanie—just like me.

Over
the summer, Voodoo hires new employees in waves. In June, they hired
seven of us from a group of applicants that packed the New Market
Theater building lobby with pink applications in hand. At least three
were gone by August. If this Nike guy doesn’t buy a damned doughnut, it
will be four.

“You
can’t leave without buying our most famous doughnut, the bacon maple
bar,” I tell him, praying I’ll get a large family of rotund tourists
from Dallas next. We’re always hoping to spot XXL Cowboys jerseys, as
visiting Texans tend to gorge themselves on fritters and the hemorrhoid
pillow-sized Tex-Ass, Voodoo’s most expensive offerings. The Tex-Ass,
which is the size of six regular doughnuts, is free if you finish it
within 80 seconds. I’ve only seen one person do it without puking into
the white bucket we provide them. The other 100 or so had to fork over
$5.25.

DANZIG FOR DOUGHNUTS: This story’s author (right) with the former singer for the Misfits.

IMAGE: Pete Cottell

If Henry Ford
were to strap on a pair of slip-resistant Doc Martens and step behind
the counter, he’d start excitedly asking questions—assuming he could be
heard over Metallica’s Master of Puppets, which one of my
shiftmates decides to blare during his hour of stereo time. There are no
rules for the Voodoo stereo, but it’s considered poor form to turn down
the volume on someone else’s turn.

To
fill the pink boxes littered throughout Old Town and being carried in
security queues at PDX, it takes a small army of people.

Flour,
yeast and other staples arrive in nondescript bags via BakeMark USA, a
restaurant wholesaler based in Southern California. A tandem of
“yeasters” follows strict guidelines—written on pink paper that’s
haphazardly taped to the wall—to determine how much yeast to roll out
and when. After the dough rises, it goes to a fryer charged with mixing
batter for cake doughnuts, and ensuring enough bacon is fried and ready
to adorn Voodoo’s top-selling confection.

Racks
of plain doughnuts sit until a team of two or three decorators turn
them into Old Dirty Bastards and Grape Apes. Employees don’t learn this
until they’ve mastered register and janitor shifts. After that, they
learn to make the doughnuts.

I
capped out at decorator, never rising to yeaster or fryer, positions
where you can either disfigure yourself or ruin an entire batch of
dough. There’s also a prep shift that does nothing but scoop frosting
from one bin into another, crush Chick-O-Stick bars for a doughnut no
one ever buys and mix 15 shades of red icing for the deco team’s piping
bags.

Finally, doughnuts are sold by a register jockey who tries to stuff cash into the drawer fast enough not to get fired.

Not
one of those jobs is particularly undesirable. Voodoo’s worst shift, by
far, is the janitor, who spends eight hours washing and rewashing the
same trash can-sized mixing bowl, mopping the grease-slick floors and
wrangling an endless barrage of garbage.

But
it gets worse. According to yet another piece of pink paper, it’s the
janitor’s job to retrieve any pink box visible from the under the neon
Voodoo Doll sign hanging in front of the store—problematic, since people
who buy a dozen doughnuts at 4 am rarely know how to properly dispose
of their trash. Janitors spend their nights jogging across Southwest 3rd
Avenue to pick up stray boxes dumped behind Dante’s.

The
night-shift janitor is also the person most likely to have run-ins with
the assorted drunks, hobos, trustafarians and meth-heads who loiter
about the area that Voodoo’s owners refer to as “the crotch of
Portland.”

ILLUSTRATION: Jenny Zych

“Are you throwing
those away?” It’s 4 am on a Saturday in August and a spindly woman in a
leopard-print dress screams this at me as I hoist 70 pounds of unused
doughnuts into a metal container marked “COMPOST ONLY.” She’s a
cracked-out Beyoncé starring in a Spike Lee movie about a prostitute who
reforms and goes to medical school—before she gets clean. I ignore her
prattling as I try to cram a flimsy compostable bag of undecorated dough
into a bloated dumpster.

As usual, the bag tears open.

“That’s
what y’all get!” she cackles as the bag vomits its contents across the
sidewalk. “You should be donatin’ that shit to charity, but oohhhhh no! You gotta be tellin’ Jesus that his people ain’t good enough for y’alls fancy, fancy doughnuts!”

I
try to be nice. “If you’d like to play Robin Hood and distribute the
wealth amongst your friends here, be my guest,” I say. “There’s plenty
for all!”

“Fuck you!” she snaps at me. “You will die alone! Ya hear me? Then you can have all the goddamn doughnuts you want!”

She
spins around, wobbles off her high heels and trips into the
solar-powered trash compactor no one seems to want to put their garbage
into. I sigh and go back to picking up trash. For this, I’m paid $10 an
hour plus health and dental benefits and a share of the tips, which
works out to about another $2 an hour.

Most restaurants
strive to maximize profits by upselling patrons on mozzarella sticks to
wring an extra dollar or two out of their wallets. The assumption is
that paying customers are a finite resource. This is not the case at
Voodoo Doughnut. When there’s no shortage of people willing to fork over
cash for your product, the point of sale becomes the bottleneck. Sales
are dictated by how many people you can shoo out the door—not in.

This
creates an odd dynamic. Unlike every other service-industry or retail
job I’ve had—20 or so in my 30 years—at Voodoo you’re allowed, even
encouraged, to be abrupt with the customers. There are few regulars at
Voodoo. Most need to be hustled through the sideshow so another mark can
hand over a $20 from the lobby ATM. This is why Voodoo workers appear
to be surly. If we smile, customers take their time.

I
learned on my first day that graciousness is terribly inefficient. Early
in my shift, I waited on an elderly woman from Indiana. She admired my
patience and pleasant demeanor. I was proud of keeping my cool and
helping her decide on a blueberry cake doughnut, which set her back $1.

My
manager pulled me aside during my lunch break—I never saw Pogson at the
shop, and saw Shannon only before or after his Monday night Karaoke From
Hell gigs at Dante’s—to show me a printed report for my till.

“Great
job, buddy,” he said. “I can see you’re good with customers, which is
awesome. But I need you to step it up. See Janni over here? She’s a pro.
She was dropping $1,000 by lunch at the end of her first week. No
pressure, but, ya know, we really need you to get to that level. OK?
OK!”

He
rubbed my shoulders and ran back to the deco station. The guy next to
him was taking his time decorating a tray of Voodoo Doll doughnuts to
look like Harry Potter characters.

Within a week, I was much faster. And I started to enjoy screwing with the customers.

“Hi,”
squeaked a girl wearing a crucifix and a shirt that proclaimed her the
maid of honor. “I’d like, uh, erm...the C and B?” She tried not to make
eye contact while asking for a giant cream-filled doughnut shaped like a
penis.

“Oh,” I replied haughtily. “You mean the Cock and Balls? The doughnut that’s shaped like a giant penis? Let me check and see if I can satisfy your appetite for that item—it sure is popular tonight!”

If
we run out of Cock and Balls—which happens a lot on Friday nights—the
customer will look at me like I just kicked a puppy. Even after I
explain that it’s just a phallic version of the Portland Cream, the
damage is done. I’ve ruined their night. Off to the all-male revue they
go with heavy hearts and a bag of Triple Chocolate Penetration doughnuts
they’ll probably give to a homeless person in a sleeping bag on the
Burnside Bridge.

But
the strategy to get people out the door—while maximizing the cash they
leave behind—is even more intricate. The random Voodoo Dozen is priced
cheaper than a regular dozen so cashiers can sidestep the customer’s
time-consuming indecision and get rid of soon-to-be-stale doughnuts.

And
how do they know which doughnuts are nearly going bad? Ever notice the
paper under the Memphis Mafia fritter on the speed racks is white while
the paper under the Gay Bar is brown? They’re color-coded by shift, so
cashiers know which doughnuts are oldest. When you order a Voodoo Dozen
at midnight, you’re getting something off the white paper—made by the
day shift that clocked out around 8 pm.

Pro
tip: If you want the freshest doughnut at 9 am, get something that’s on
brown paper. If you want the freshest doughnut at 9 pm, get something on
white paper.

ILLUSTRATION: Jenny Zych

I never thought
they would catch the kid. I was locking my bike before work when I saw a
group of crust punks sitting at one of the picnic tables in front of
Voodoo. A kid walks up, pulls a switchblade out of his pocket and
slashes a foot-long hole in our new blue umbrella. He crams the knife
back into his pocket and runs off. I flag down a lethargic-looking
member of Portland Clean & Safe squad and tell him what I saw. He
says he will alert the police and waddles away. The kids at the table
are not happy. I just snitched on their friend.

“What the fuck, bro?” one of them yells at me.

“Yeah,
dude,” says a shirtless kid with dreadlocks who appears to be their
leader. “We take care of shit on our own out here. Street justice, bro.
That kid was just bein’ a clown. We would’ve straightened him out right
then and there. We don’t need the cops.”

The
cops found the kid, cuffed him and called me to confirm his identity. I
asked what would happen. “Well,” a bike cop replied. “He’s a minor, so
we’re trying to get a hold of his mom. He’ll probably end up in juvenile
detention for a few days. Who knows after that.”

I
spent the next two weeks looking over my shoulder, convinced “street
justice” was coming for me—this was in July, just after a 70-year-old
employee of the neighboring Portland Outdoor Store was assaulted with a
skateboard.

I
have since found a new gig at a coffeehouse in Laurelhurst with better
pay, better hours and clientele who only get upset when the last slice
of quiche disappears. There are no panhandlers and I get free food of
sustenance. The only downside is I am required to be polite, no matter
how long customers take to decide between a croissant and a bagel.

Meanwhile,
back in the “Entertainment District,” the Voodoo circus is still in
full swing. This is what happens when one of the city’s largest
cash-only businesses sits in the seediest neighborhood in town. Because
panhandlers know everyone stuck in Voodoo’s slow-moving line has a
pocketful of cash, they stalk the naive tourists like a pack of wolves.
It’s not uncommon to see a combination of buskers, druggies with
makeshift signs and ungrateful kids from the suburbs all trying to give
patrons the shakedown.

What the hobos don’t get, the store does.

On a
sunny Saturday, Voodoo rakes in piles of cash—literally. With four
registers each taking in at least $1,000 in small bills on a busy shift,
you have a mountain of greenbacks. I once creaked opened a door to find
a team of managers feeding tall stacks of rumpled bills into a wheezing
bill-counting machine. It looked like a scene from Scarface, but without the cocaine and machine guns.